Jade is looking down at me. I experience brief but vivid deja vu. Is Jade my guardian angel? Her face is a mask of concern. As my eyelids flutter open she looks up, beckons someone over. I think the sky is a deep grey colour, but then realise that I am inside one of the tents.
String is there. He looks similarly worried, though is eyes betray something else, a confidence that I find strangely repulsive.
“Jade, I saw …” I begin, but though I remember espying something terrible, I cannot recall exactly what it was.
“Keep still,” she says, a quiver in her voice, “just lie still. The Sickness almost had you. String gave you the cure. Rubbed it on your chest, your temples, your throat. He thought you might have been too far gone, so he fed you some of it as well.”
“Fed me?”
Jade shrugs apologetically. “A tube, into your stomach. You’ll have a sore throat for a while. You were wandering around in the fruit plantation when I found you, mumbling, calling a woman’s name. You looked like the walking dead.”
Memories begin to force their way into the light. With them come terrible images, and an awful realisation that turns me cold.
“Jade, I saw bodies, hundreds of bodies. They’re using them, storing them.” I am whispering, but as soon as I begin String appears above me again, his hand lowering towards my face. I cry out, certain that he is going to silence me forever, but Jade is holding me down as String places his hand on my forehead. His skin is cool and clammy.
“He’s burning up. It’s a fight, now, between the Sickness and the cure. I hope I got him in time, but sometimes it’s a matter of will. The cure is just the catalyst.”
Faintness clouds my vision, but I bite my lip and try to stay conscious. I have to tell Jade, warn her, make her get away from this place.
“Will you tell him?” I hear her ask. I can imagine her expression, distant and worried, just as she looked when there was more bad stuff for me to know.
“Not yet.” String replies. “Later, when he’s better. Not now.”
“I think he saw something,” Jade whispers.
I sense String looking down at me. “I’ll have words with Tiarnan. Stay with him, Jade. He’s got a fight on his hands.” Footsteps recede into the distance. All I can see is the unremitting greyness above me. “If you need me, ask someone to find me. I have some work to do.”
Jade bends over me again, softly telling me to be quiet, conserve my strength. And although I have some things to tell her, my body forces me to obey her. I drift once more into welcoming unconsciousness.